“Psycho”
Norman Bates
Alfred Hitchcock’s
murderous motel
proprietor is scary
enough, but he’s
perhaps more fright-
ening when you learn that the Psycho
character was based on a real person.
ed gein was convicted of killing two
women in the 1950s and was suspected
of many more murders around his home-
town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. He even
dug up graves for body parts and made
masks out of human skin. Robert Bloch,
who wrote the novel Psycho, co-opted
many of Gein’s strange obsessions for
Bates, including his morbid shrine to
his overbearing dead mother. Like
Bates, Gein came across as polite and
almost normal, prompting the head
nurse of the mental hospital where he
was held to reportedly say, “If all our
patients were like him, we’d have no
trouble at all.”Reader’s Digest
Mary Poppins
P. L. Travers’s im-
mensely popular
Mary Poppins, the star
of novels about a
no-nonsense but
magical nanny, was
modeled on her own great-aunt Sass,
aka christina saraset. “Imagine a
bulldog whose ferocious exterior covers
a heart tender to the point of sentimen-
tality and you have Christina Saraset,”
Travers once wrote. The first Mary Pop-
pins book was published in 1934, and
among its legion of devoted fans were
Walt Disney’s daughters, who persuaded
their father to buy the rights. It took him
14 years, but he finally convinced Travers
that he would do justice to her work. The
movie, of course, was beloved by most,
with one notable exception—Travers
herself. She hated the film’s sugarcoated
sentimentality and animated scenes so
much that she refused to grant Disney
permission to make a sequel.120 march 2019 co
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